10 Tips for Online Personal Trainers on Fitness Website Design

If you’ve got an online personal training business, your website will likely play a major role in your fitness marketing strategy. Unlike marketing a face-to-face training business, you’ll rely more heavily on how visitors think and feel on your site when it comes to getting leads. In this article, we’ll go over the top 10 fitness website design tips for online personal trainers to help you get more traffic and leads.

1. Tell Website Visitors They’re in the Right Place

The first question a website visitor will have when they land on your home page is whether or not they’re in the right place.

The easiest way to ensure them that they are in the right place is with a keyword specific headline positioned high up on the home page. Can you guess the keyword in the example below?

Use this space to describe exactly what you do and who you do it for. This will help the website visitor take their next steps on your site and it improves search engine rankings.

2. Don’t Make Offers Too Early

It’s tempting to have your free trial or eBook positioned front and center on the home page. After all, that’s the spot that gets the most website visits, right?

True, but gone are the days when people haphazardly gave up their email in exchange for an eBook, especially on the home page.

Instead, consider inviting the website visitor to take their next logical step. Why are they on the site? What are they looking for? Probably to learn about your services and pricing. So that’s what you offer them.

Save your eBooks for the blog pages where your website visitors are there to learn.

3. Answer Your Visitors’ Questions

As a follow on from the previous tip, each page of your fitness website should answer the questions a website visitor has.

For example, the Home page is designed to introduce the sub pages of the site, so sections that introduce each sub page will enable the visitor to easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for.

The About page should outline what you can do for your clients and introduce you and the members of your team.

Service pages are for prices and how the service works.

4. Online Personal Trainers Need to Stop Trying to be Special

One of the first things a personal trainer ask their fitness website designer for is something “unique” and “special”.

While your branding and message absolutely should be unique to your business, your design should not.

There’s something called Design Convention which is extremely important to the way someone uses your website.

Design convention is what a website visitor expects to see. For example, they expect a navigation to appear at the top of the site and they expect the footer to be at the bottom.

This is why most sites, no matter the industry, tend to look pretty similar on the face of it. Going against design convention would be like reading a book with the pages i the wrong order.

However, if you’d like to experiment with design without breaking conventional design protocol feel free, just make sure it doesn’t disrupt your messaging.

5. Use Images of People

Faces make a huge difference when it comes to connecting a website visitor with your company. That doesn’t mean the face has to be you. It just needs to be a face.

Using images of real people expressing authentic emotions appeal to our primal nature. Smiles make us feel at ease. Seeing a sad person make us feel empathy. Try your best not to use stock photos. If you have to, its worth paying for them.

A good website design makes use of this basic primal conditioning, not to manipulate a visitor, but to help them feel the way you want them to feel about your business.

6. Fix Your Navigation

Navigation is among the first things a website visitor sees. Good navigation describes exactly what they’ll find on the page without overwhelming them with too many options.

One of the biggest mistakes online personal trainers make when designing sites is to overload the website visitor with pages and pages of information.

Instead, take a step back and think about what a website visitor really need to become a lead. Is the About page absolutely essential to them making that decision? If not, link to it from the footer and save space in the main navigation menu.

7. Hold Back With Social Media

For online personal trainers, more fans and followers is perfectly respectable goal and you should try to obtain those things for your social media platform, but you don’t need to make a big deal of it on site and here’s why:

The goal of your website is to turn website visitors into leads, not send them away to another platform where they get distracted and don’t take any action with you.

Have a social media presence on site to show trust and authenticity for those who want to explore, but keep it discreet and in places where the visitor might expect to see it like the footer.

8. Use Descriptive Headlines

Website readers won’t typically read your web pages word for word. When was the last time you did that? Humans think they’re busy and they’re always in a rush, so they skip through the main headlines until they find what they’re looking for.

With that in mind, your page headers should describe exactly what the content underneath it is going to say.

For example, instead of “What We Do” use “Online Personal Training Services”.

9. Avoid Long Paragraphs

Nothing is more frustrating than landing on a website looking for information only to be met with a wall of text. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for and the task of finding the information seems never ending.

Notice how in this article each paragraph is broken down into smaller sections with spacing between each main point?

That break in the paragraph reduces cognitive load and gives the visitor small feelings of accomplishment after each paragraph. This encourages easy reading.

Where possible, use bullet points to explain points in a simpler and more concise way.

10. Online Personal Trainers Need to Display Competence

On the list of what’s important to a website visitor when choosing towers with you, competence is at the top of that list. As far as online personal training is concerned, display competence is imperative. This is where visitors will form the initial opinions.

Showing that you can do what you say you can do is absolutely paramount and you can show this with testimonials and before/after images.

Competence is so important that if you can show it on every page, do. Use snippets of testimonials with head-shots, before/after galleries and client statistics to show potential clients that when they work with you, they’re in with a good chance of achieving the same thing.

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When it comes to creating a great website, personal trainers need to know that navigation is crucial. If someone is looking for information about a trainer, such as their specialties or their location, they’re going to want to find that information as quickly as possible. Smooth navigation ensures that a user doesn’t have to spend ample time finding such info.